On Wed, 16 Jun 2010, Charles Marcus wrote:
On 2010-06-16 11:39 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
Yes, but Gentoo isn't supplying binaries. The amount of project time/effort to get all those Debian binaries compiled and out the door is gargantuan compared to the Gentoo source model.
Ah, forgot about that... its amazing how you get used to the freedom of a source based system.
Yeah, I've been enjoying that with FreeBSD for a very long time. They have "packages" as well, but I never really used them - what are the chances that the maintainer and I both want the exact same compile-time options?
The biggest argument against source based installs is they take too long. On reasonably modern hardware it isn't much of an issue, and even on older hardware - I mean, really how often do you have to do the installation? Mine last for many years...
I do binary installs of the OS, source installs of the additional software, source based upgrades of the OS. I also get something that I haven't yet seen in the mainstream linux distros, which is a clear delineation between what's the "OS" and what's "added-on". If it's under /usr/local somewhere, it came from elsewhere. Otherwise, it's part of the OS. Makes upgrades simple, even if I'm moving /usr/local wholesale from one box to another - since I have a nice stable ABI and backwards compatibility, I can take a bunch of stuff built for say, FreeBSD 4.8 and run it on a new 8.0 box, then upgrade at my leisure.
My point was that building binaries is one of the reasons it takes Debian so long to get a new release out. AFAIK, Gentoo isn't shackled with this issue.
Correct, it isn't, and with USE flags, it makes custom compiling (and recompiling if needs change) with support for *precisely* what you need extremely easy even for people like me... ;)
FreeBSD supports much fewer architectures, but I know they still have dealt with issues trying to crank out packages for a few archs plus a few supported versions of the OS. I think Yahoo recently gave them a bunch of boxes to help with this, but yeah, when you start thinking about building not just what *you* might install, but every X11 app available, every window manager, etc. that's a pretty hefty chunk of cpu time, regardless of how modern your build cluster is.
And yeah, having either a config file or make flags to repeatedly build the software with the same options kicks ass. :)
Charles
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Best regards,
Charles